It turns out that the five second rule is an underestimate:

Connecticut College seniors and cell and molecular biology majors Molly Goettsche and Nicole Moin took two food samples – apple slices and Skittles candies – to the Connecticut College dining hall and snack bar. They dropped the foods onto the floors in both locations for five, 10, 30 and 60 second intervals, and also tested them after allowing five minutes to elapse. They then looked for any rogue bacteria that might have attached to the foods.

The researchers found no bacteria were present on the foods that had remained on the floor for five, 10 or 30 seconds. The apple slices did pick up bacteria after one minute, however, and the Skittles showed a bacterial presence after remaining on the floor for five minutes.

The results prove, according Goettsche and Moin, that you can wait at least 30 seconds to pick up wet foods and more than a minute to pick up dry foods before they become contaminated with bacteria. [...]

I'm a total wimp: I apply the "1/1000th of a second rule."

[Via Improbable Research]

Jon Carroll proposes a new Olympic sport:

Cat watching is among the most inexpensive of all sports. The equipment outlay is minimal, and the kibble expenses are modest until the cat enters middle age, at which time it needs Medi-Special Organic Urethra-Enhancing Venison and Potato Fancy Mix. I ask you: Nordic combined, or cat watching? It isn't even a choice.

[...]

I enjoyed a marathon round of cat watching over the weekend. As a wily veteran of the sport, I know certain tricks. In a sense, cat watching is really spot watching. Cats have spots. Sometimes the choice of spots is rational — a high spot to watch for predator or prey; a quiet spot to maximize napping; a secret spot because cats like secrets. There are also passive-aggressive spots. A cat sleeping on the stairs is a cat with anger issues.

Unlike leopards, cats can change their spots. They do so erratically, and a successful cat watcher is always on the lookout for inexplicable spot shifting. Why the middle of the floor? Why now? Why the left side of the couch instead of the right? Why the computer keyboard, or, as I originally typed, whnn6 45& COMTTTT Frqqq+?

[...]

100 Movies, 100 Quotes, 100 Numbers.

I managed to identify about 90 of the 100 films used. (Not that it's a competition, but I couldn't help but try to spot them all.)

There's something oddly admirable about proposals like this that assume that what we all want above all else – or rather, what we all need – is a rational, orderly means of describing the world around us:

Stedman Whitwell, 19th-century social reformer and architect of Robert Owen’s failed Utopian city at New Harmony, was deeply troubled by the will-nilly way that cities and towns were named in America, and proposed a more "rational" system of geographical nomenclature, which would have renamed Washington as Feili Neivul, Philadelphia as Outeon Eveldo, and Pittsburgh as Otfu Veitoup. From New Harmony Movement by George B. Lockwood:

Whitwell noted some of the incongruities in American nomenclature, and deplored the repetition which was producing "Washingtons" and "Springfields" in every State in the Union. He proposed to give each locality a distinctive name by expressing in a compound word the latitude and longitude of the place, thus enabling one to locate any community geographically when the name was once known. Letters were proposed as substitute for the numerals used in expressing latitude and longitude [...]

Sadly, the full list of rules Whitwell devised has been lost, so it's not possible to produce a complete map of Whitwell's version of the United States.

Bruce Campbell may be too old and fat to play Ashley J Williams nowadays, but that doesn't make him any less of a god among men.

The latest evidence: his cover version of Hungry Like the Wolf.

[Via Apropos of Something]

The residents of East Prawle in Devon have implemented a distinctly low tech solution to a high tech problem:

Mobile phone users in a remote village are to get a special podium that will allow them to make and receive calls, after they found the only spot they could get a signal was two feet above their heads.

Villagers in East Prawle, Devon, had to stand on a bench on the village green to make their calls, but the bench became dirty and damaged from over-use. To solve the problem, Chivelstone parish council has decided to build a podium.

[...]

I wonder how they're going to cope with the Digital Switchover a couple of years from now.

[Via Kevan Davis]

Brendan Dawes has written a program that creates a snapshot of a film in a single image:

This explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time.

Dawes has submitted a print of 2001: A Space Odyssey produced using his software to the Coudal Partners Swap Meat and made a signed, numbered limited edition of 50 prints available for purchase at a price of US$300. I just wish I had $300 to spare…

[Via Daring Fireball]

Alex Papadimoulis is not a fan of Job Interview 2.0:

Some years ago, someone at Microsoft noticed that they were having a bit of a Resources problem. A Human Resources problem to be specific. There were a whole lot of job openings (thousands, in fact) and a whole lot of applications (hundreds of thousands, in fact), and no easy way to match the right applicants with the right jobs. So they decided to reinvent the Job Interview.

Traditionally, job interviews are used to ascertain two things: how competent the candidate is and how well his personality (or lack thereof) will fit in with the organization. With their introduction of Job Interview 2.0, Microsoft included both of those features and added one additional: how the candidate responds when presented with asinine, utterly pointless, and completely ridiculous brainteaser questions.

[...]

One reader shared with me the story of his brainteaser interview.

During a screening interview, I was asked how I would design a bike fit for someone visually impaired. I responded something to the effect of, "What, like, for blind people?", and she answered yes.

I thought for a moment and then I responded, "Well.. a blind person riding a bike doesn't sound like a very safe idea, so I would make the bike stationary, maybe with a fan blowing in the person's face. He probably wouldn't even know the difference."

She was speechless.

Now, granted, he will not get the job. Despite the complete absurdity of the design request, and the complete practicality of his answer, the job will go to a candidate who manages to answer the question by designing an extremely overcomplicated solution for a completely non-existent problem. And that candidate will be the same person who designs their software.

With all due respect to Bilge Ebiri of Nerve's ScreenGrab: this can't possibly be the funniest fight scene in film history. Nor can this.

Why not? Six little words: Roddy Piper. Keith David. They Live.

Not only the funniest fight scene ever committed to celluloid, but also the best fight scene ever committed to celluloid.

Please let this rumour be unfounded:

[Here] are the directors rumored to be on New Line Cinema's short list to helm The Hobbit: Stephen Sommers, Michael Bay, Brad Silberling, Bill Condon.

What, Brett Ratner was busy?

[Via Nerve ScreenGrab]

How can any reasonable person resist this kid doing a karaoke version of My Chemical Romance's Welcome to the Black Parade? Too, too cute.

(I have a sneaking suspicion that if I go looking I'll find whole web communities of proud parents posting their kids' vocal stylings for the world to enjoy. A pleasure best enjoyed in small doses, I'd imagine.)

[Via Copy, Right?]

Worst. Date. Ever!

[Via James Nicoll]

In the last days of the German Democratic Republic Stasi agents made frantic efforts to destroy their files. Now German researchers have written a computer program to undo the Stasi's attempt to hide what they knew:

The software works like a human putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The pieces are scanned. Next, the digital images are analyzed and grouped by color, shape, handwriting, typeface, and other characteristics. Then similar pieces are put together. The main difference? Speed. It took 24 people 12 years to reassemble 323 sacks of paper. The software is expected to finish the remaining 16,000 sacks in about five years.

Apparently the Stasi didn't have enough mechanical shredders to deal with all their files, so they had to resort to ripping up documents by hand. It's these hand-torn documents the program is working on, though the researchers reckon they could adapt their algorithm to do the same with the output of shredders without too much bother. If they succeed, presumably within a couple of years security-conscious offices will have to upgrade from shredders to, say, desktop furnaces.

[Via FP Passport]

Take an ordinary Hollywood feature film, create a poster using some of the visual tropes more commonly used to market arthouse films, and you get a Classy Movie. Or at any rate a nice poster for a maybe-not-so-great film.

I particularly liked the posters for the classy versions of 300 and Barb Wire.

[Via MetaFilter]

Q. How long does it take to evacuate 873 people from an Airbus A380 in pitch darkness?

A. 77 seconds.

(Mind, that was in ideal conditions, with no smoke or flames to cause panic and disorientation and with passengers who knew that they were about to take part in an evacuation test. I'm guessing that if it ever has to be done for real it'll take at least twice as long.)

[Via Telstar Logistics, via rc3.org]

This marvellous collection of photographs of deep sea wildlife demonstrates that J B S Haldane was right: the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

[Via GromBlog]

The new version of Moby's web site has a new feature. In the man's own words:

there's a new part of moby.com called 'film music'. it's essentially a function that allows independent and non-profit filmmakers to download and use my music for free. we're starting with about 60 pieces of eclectic, unreleased, film music, but over-time i'll continue to update it and add more music.

these 60 pieces of music can be downloaded and used for free by student filmmakers and indie filmmakers and, basically, anyone making a non-commercial^* film, be it 2 minutes long or 400 minutes long.

if you're a filmmaker (or are in need of free music for a non-commercial film or video) you can sign up and download and use this music for free.

i have a lot of friends in the independent film world, and their biggest complaint is that it's either expensive or onerous to license music for their films.

so that's why i'm making a lot of my music available for free use for non-profit, independent films.

i hope you find it useful.

[...]

*-yup, the asterisk. the music in the film-music part of moby.com is available for free use for student films and independent films and non-profit films and shorts and etc. the music is available so long as these films are not used for commercial (i.e-making money) purposes.

if you use the music in your film and your film goes on to make money: great, and congratulations.

before your film makes money, though, you'll have to apply for a commercial license for the music. i promise that the commercial licenses won't be expensive or difficult to obtain.

and any money that this music generates from commercial licenses will be given to a charity.

this year that charity will be the humane society.

ok, i hope that's clear. thanks.

Seems to me to be a very reasonable deal.

[Via No Rock And Roll Fun]

Steve Jobs: Fatal Error Occurred.

A Harvard professor thinks computers nowadays are a bit too good at remembering things Nate Anderson at Ars Technica explains:

The rise of fast processors and cheap storage means that remembering, once incredibly difficult for humans, has become simple. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor in Harvard's JFK School of Government, argues that this shift has been bad for society, and he calls instead for a new era of "forgetfulness."

[...]

"If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved, they can easily be combined into a composite picture of ourselves," he writes in the paper. "Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely and openly."

In other words, it threatens to make us all politicians. [...]

The reason, as you might expect, is that if computers remember everything then government and businesses can, in principle, piece all those items together to form a picture of what we say and do. Professor Mayer-Schönberger thinks the solution is to make timed deletions of data the norm, so that we have to go out of our way to tell our computer to retain a file beyond some default period. Think of it as an extension of the common practice of deleting log files once they reach a certain age.

As someone who has copies of emails going back to 1992, this idea doesn't appeal overmuch. But that might just be me…

Photographer Mark Richards has just co-authored Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers. As the subtitle suggests, it's a book of photographs of old, pre-microcomputer computer hardware. His personal site has some samples of his work. It's a Flash-based site, so I can't give a direct link: just click on the Index button at the bottom left, then select 'Book: Core Memory' and enjoy.

There's some truly gorgeous imagery there, a nice reminder of the era before a 'computer' was a circuit board with a few microchips and a single, neatly folded ribbon cable connecting the hard disk and CD drive to the motherboard. If there's one thing there's no shortage of in Richards' work, it's cables.

I'm going to have to watch out for the book when it shows up in bookshops over here next month. Eye candy plus nostalgia: what's not to like?

[Via Scrubbles.net]